I. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to communication, and more specifically to techniques for sending channel state information.
II. Background
In a wireless communication system, a base station may utilize multiple (T) transmit antennas for data transmission to a terminal equipped with multiple (R) receive antennas. The multiple transmit and receive antennas form a multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) channel that may be used to increase throughput and/or improve reliability. For example, the base station may transmit up to T data streams simultaneously from the T transmit antennas to improve throughput. Alternatively, the base station may transmit a single data stream from all T transmit antennas to improve reception by the terminal.
Good performance may be achieved by transmitting one or more data streams via the MIMO channel in a manner such that the highest overall throughput can be achieved for the data transmission. To facilitate this, the terminal may estimate the MIMO channel response and send channel state information to the base station. The channel state information may indicate how many data streams to transmit, how to transmit the data streams, and a channel quality indicator (CQI) for each data stream. The CQI for each data stream may indicate a received signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) for that data stream and may be used to select an appropriate rate for the data stream. The channel state information may improve performance of data transmission to the terminal. However, the terminal may consume a large amount of radio resources to send the channel state information to the base station.
There is therefore a need in the art for techniques to efficiently send channel state information in a wireless communication system.